Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

How Russia Can Spend Money to Influence the 2020 Election—Legally

In April 2018, a steel pipe manufacturer called Wheatland Tube gave $1 million to the super-PAC supporting Donald Trump’s reelection and the campaigns of Trump-allied Republicans. Around the same time, the CEO of its parent company, Barry Zekelman, dined with Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. in a private dining room at the Trump […]

Is Our EPA Chief Stupid or Evil?

In most studies of new drugs, half the patients are given the experimental drug and the other half are given a placebo. It’s a “blinded” study because the patients don’t know which they’ve been given. In a double-blinded study, the doctors don’t know either. Andrew Wheeler, head of the EPA, is a wee bit confused […]

Private Border Wall Expands Onto Federal Land, Blocking Access to Historic Site

We Build the Wall has expanded its private border wall to land owned by the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, a federal agency.

The post Private Border Wall Expands Onto Federal Land, Blocking Access to Historic Site appeared first on The Intercept.

Right-Wing Sting Group Project Veritas Is Breaking Facebook’s “Authentic Behavior” Rule. Now What?

Sworn testimony by a Project Veritas operative shows the group is violating Facebook rules designed to curb troll farms, a key expert says.

The post Right-Wing Sting Group Project Veritas Is Breaking Facebook’s “Authentic Behavior” Rule. Now What? appeared first on The Intercept.

Medical marijuana does not reduce opioid deaths

Legalizing medical marijuana does not reduce the rate of fatal opioid overdoses, according to researchers.

Pneumonia mapped in largest genomic survey of any disease-causing bacterium

Researchers have mapped the most common bacterial cause of pneumonia around the world and revealed how these bacteria evolve in response to vaccination. Scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators carried out a global genomic survey of Streptococcus pneumoniae, discovering 621 strains across more than fifty countries. Published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the study will help predict which strains will be important for new pneumococcal vaccines.

Five California Cities Are Trying to Kill an Important Location Privacy Bill

If you rely on shared biked or scooters, your location privacy is at risk. Cities across the United States are currently pushing companies that operate shared mobility services like Jump, Lime, and Bird to share individual trip data for any and all trips taken within their boundaries, including where and when trips start and stop and granular details about the specific routes taken. This data is extremely sensitive, as it can be used to reidentify riders—particularly for habitual trips—and to track movements and patterns over time. While it is beneficial for cities to have access to aggregate data about shared mobility devices to ensure that they are deployed safely, efficiently, and equitably, cities should not be allowed to force operators to turn over sensitive, personally identifiable information about riders.

As these programs become more common, the California Legislature is considering a bill, A.B. 1112, that would ensure that local authorities receive only aggregated or non-identifiable trip data from shared mobility providers. EFF supports A.B. 1112, authored by Assemblymember Laura Friedman, which strikes the appropriate balance between protecting individual privacy and ensuring that local authorities have enough information to regulate our public streets so that they work for all Californians. The bill makes sure that local authorities will have the ability to impose deployment requirements in low-income areas to ensure equitable access, fleet caps to decrease congestion, and limits on device speed to ensure safety. And importantly, the bill clarifies that CalEPCA—California’s landmark electronic privacy law—applies to data generated by shared mobility devices, just as it would any other electronic devices.

Five California cities, however, are opposing this privacy-protective legislation. At least four of these cities—Los Angeles, Santa Monica, San Francisco, and Oakland—have pilot programs underway that require shared mobility companies to turn over sensitive individual trip data as a condition to receiving a permit. Currently, any company that does not comply cannot operate in the city. The cities want continued access to individual trip data and argue that removing “customer identifiers” like names from this data should be enough to protect rider privacy.

The problem? Even with names stripped out, location information is notoriously easy to reidentify, particularly for habitual trips. This is especially true when location information is aggregated over time. And the data shows that riders are, in fact, using dockless mobility vehicles for their regular commutes. For example, as documented in Lime’s Year End Report for 2018, 40 percent of Lime riders reported commuting to or from work or school during their most recent trip. And remember, in the case of dockless scooters and bikes, these devices may be parked directly outside a rider’s home or work. If a rider used the same shared scooter or bike service every day to commute between their work and home, it’s not hard to imagine how easy it might be to reidentify them—even if their name was not explicitly connected to their trip data. Time-stamped geolocation data could also reveal trips to medical specialists, specific places of worship, and particular neighborhoods or bars. Patterns in the data could reveal social relationships, and potentially even extramarital affairs, as well as personal habits, such as when people typically leave the house in the morning, go to the gym or run errands, how often they go out on evenings and weekends, and where they like to go.

The cities claim that they will institute “technical safeguards” and “business processes” to prohibit reidentification of individual consumers, but so long as the cities have the individual trip data, reidentification will be possible—by city transportation agencies, law enforcement, ICE, or any other third parties that receive data from cities.

The cities’ promises to keep the data confidential and make sure the records are exempt from disclosure under public records laws also fall flat. One big issue is that the cities have not outlined and limited the specific purposes for which they plan to use the geolocation data they are demanding. They also have not delineated how they will minimize their collection of personal information (including trip data) to data necessary to achieve those objectives. This violates both the letter and the spirit of the California Constitution’s right to privacy, which explicitly lists privacy as an inalienable right of all people and, in the words of the California Supreme Court, “prevents government and business interests from collecting and stockpiling unnecessary information about us” or “misusing information gathered for one purpose in order to serve other purposes[.]”

The biggest mistake local jurisdictions could make would be to collect data first and think about what to do with it later—after consumers’ privacy has been put at risk. That’s unfortunately what cities are doing now, and A.B. 1112 will put a stop to it.

The time is ripe for thoughtful state regulation reining in local demands for individual trip data. As we’ve told the California legislature, bike- and scooter- sharing services are proliferating in cities across the United States, and local authorities should have the right to regulate their use. But those efforts should not come at the cost of riders’ privacy.

We urge the California legislature to pass A.B. 1112 and protect the privacy of all Californians who rely on shared mobility devices for their transportation needs. And we urge cities in California and across the United States to start respecting the privacy of riders. Cities should start working with regulators and the public to strike the right balance between their need to obtain data for city planning purposes and the need to protect individual privacy—and they should stop working to undermine rider privacy.

EFF and Open Rights Group Defend the Right to Publish Open Source Software to the UK Government

EFF and Open Rights Group today submitted formal comments to the British Treasury, urging restraint in applying anti-money-laundering regulations to the publication of open-source software.

The UK government sought public feedback on proposals to update its financial regulations pertaining to money laundering and terrorism in alignment with a larger European directive. The consultation asked for feedback on applying onerous customer due diligence regulations to the cryptocurrency space as well as what approach the government should take in addressing “privacy coins” like Zcash and Monero. Most worrisome, the government also asked “whether the publication of open-source software should be subject to [customer due diligence] requirements.”

We’ve seen these kind of attacks on the publication of open source software before, in fights dating back to the 90s, when the Clinton administration attempted to require that anyone merely publishing cryptography source code obtain a government-issued license as an arms dealer. Attempting to force today’s open-source software publishers to follow financial regulations designed to go after those engaged in money laundering is equally obtuse.

In our comments, we describe the breadth of free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) that benefits the world today across industries and government institutions. We discuss how these regulatory proposals could have large and unpredictable consequences not only for the emerging technology of the blockchain ecosystem, but also for the FLOSS software ecosystem at large. As we stated in our comments:

If the UK government was to determine that open source software publication should be regulated under money-laundering regulations, it would be unclear how this would be enforced, or how the limits of those falling under the regulation would be determined. Software that could, in theory, provide the ability to enable cryptocurrency transactions, could be modified before release to remove these features. Software that lacked this capability could be quickly adapted to provide it. The core cryptographic algorithms that underlie various blockchain implementations, smart contract construction and execution, and secure communications are publicly known and relative trivial to express and implement. They are published, examined and improved by academics, enthusiasts, and professionals alike…

The level of uncertainty this would provide to FLOSS use and provision within the United Kingdom would be considerable. Such regulations would burden multiple industries to attempt to guarantee that their software could not be considered part of the infrastructure of a cryptographic money-laundering scheme.

Moreover, source code is a form of written creative expression, and open source code is a form of public discourse. Regulating its publication under anti-money-laundering provisions fails to honor the free expression rights of software creators in the United Kingdom, and their collaborators and users in the rest of the world.

Source code is a form of written creative expression, and open source code is a form of public discourse.

EFF is monitoring the regulatory and legislative reactions to new blockchain technologies, and we’ve recently spoken out about misguided ideas for banning cryptocurrencies and overbroad regulatory responses to decentralized exchanges. Increasingly, the regulatory backlash against cryptocurrencies is being tied to overbroad proposals that would censor the publication of open-source software, and restrict researchers’ ability to investigate, critique and communicate about the opportunities and risks of cryptocurrency.

This issue transcends controversies surrounding blockchain tech and could have significant implications for technological innovation, academic research, and freedom of expression. We’ll continue to watch the proceedings with HM Treasury, but fear similar anti-FLOSS proposals could emerge—particularly as other member states of the European Union transpose the same Anti-Money Laundering Directive into their own laws.

Read our full comments.

Hearing Tuesday: EFF Will Voice Support For California Bill Reining In Law Enforcement Use of Facial Recognition

Senate Bill 1215 Would Bar Police From Adding Facial Scanning to Body-Worn Cameras

Sacramento, California—On Tuesday, June 11, at 8:30 am, EFF Grassroots Advocacy Organizer Nathan Sheard will testify before the California Senate Public Safety Committee in support of a measure to prohibit law enforcement from using facial recognition in body cams.
Following San Francisco’s historic ban on police use of the technology—which can invade privacy, chill free speech and disproportionately harm already marginalized communities—California lawmakers are considering SB 1215, proposed legislation that would extend the ban across the state.
Face recognition technology has been shown to have disproportionately high error rates for women, the elderly, and people of color. Making matters worse, law enforcement agencies often rely on images pulled from mugshot databases. This exacerbates historical biases born of, and contributing to, over-policing in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors and other Bay Area communities have decided that police should be stopped from using the technology on the public.
The utilization of face recognition technology in connection with police body cameras would force Californians to decide between actively avoiding interaction and cooperation with law enforcement, or having their images collected, analyzed, and stored as perpetual candidates for suspicion, Sheard will tell lawmakers.
WHAT:
Hearing before the California Senate Public Safety Committee on SB 1215
WHO:
EFF Grassroots Advocacy Organizer Nathan Sheard
WHEN:
Tuesday, July 11, 8:30 am
WHERE:
California State Capitol
10th and L Streets
Room 3191
Sacramento, CA  95814

Contact:  Nathan 'nash' Sheard Grassroots Advocacy Organizer nash@eff.org

Just discovered CryptPad via the FLOSS Weekly podcast. Basically, Google docs without privacy concerns.

CryptPad in their own words:

"CryptPad is a private-by-design alternative to popular office tools and cloud services. All the content stored on CryptPad is encrypted before being sent, which means nobody can access your data unless you give them the keys (not even us)."

It's also Free software.

https://cryptpad.fr/

Better still CryptPad is on the Fediverse:

@cryptpad

#FLOSS #FOSS

How Unions and Climate Organizers Learned To Work Together in New York

Several years before Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) elevated the climate, jobs and justice framework to the national level, a coalition of labor, environmental and community groups joined together to push for a pioneering climate bill in New York.

‘Frightening’ number of #plant #extinctions found in global survey | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/10/frightening-number-of-plant-extinctions-found-in-global-survey

#Science #Ecology #Biology #Botany

Mass anomaly detected under the moon's largest crater

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system -- the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin -- and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a new study.

Scientist makes case for stabilizing forest carbon to help mitigate climate change

There's no doubt that climate change is affecting ecosystems as well as the lifestyles of plants and animals around the globe. As temperatures rise, so do the complexity of the issues. Scientists, both in the United States and around the world, are actively pursuing mitigation solutions while providing governments with the understanding of natural hazards to help stem the effects of climate change.

Tart cherry shown to decrease joint pain, sore muscles in some breast cancer patients

Tart cherry reduces the musculoskeletal effects of aromatase inhibitors in patients with non-metastatic breast cancer, according to new findings.

Here’s Why the Black-White IQ Gap Is Almost Certainly Environmental

A reader emails me: Twice now you have asserted that your “… read of the evidence is that the black-white IQ gap is almost certainly accounted for by environmental factors.” Would you please do me the favor of listing (in either a reply email or in Mother Jones) one or two of the sources for […]

Remember the BP Oil Spill? These Cleanup Workers Are Still Suffering After 9 Years.

This story was originally published by the Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nine years ago, I traveled down to the bustling Louisiana bayou fishing town of Venice, where the road south along the Mississippi River comes to an end. I joined colleagues from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental policy […]

Jeff Bezos’s Corporate Takeover of Our Lives

Amazon is an online retailer. It also runs a marketplace for other online retailers. It’s also a shipper for those sellers, and a lender to them, and a warehouse, an advertiser, a data manager and a search engine. It also runs brick-and-mortar bookstores. And grocery stores.

There are over 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States—more than half of all U.S. households. Amazon makes 45% of all e-commerce sales. Amazon is also a product manufacturer; its Alexa controls two-thirds of the digital assistant market, and the Kindle represents 84% of all e-readers. Amazon created its own holiday, Prime Day, and the surge in demand for Prime Day discounts, followed by a drop afterward, skewed the nation’s retail sales figures with a 1.8% bump in July 2017.

Oh, it’s also a major television and film studio. Its CEO owns a national newspaper. And it runs a streaming video game company called Twitch. And its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, runs an astonishing portion of the Internet and U.S. financial infrastructure. And it wants to be a logistics company. And a furniture seller. It’s angling to become one of the nation’s largest online fashion designers. It recently picked up an online pharmacy and partnered with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett to create a healthcare company. And at the same time, it’s competing with JPMorgan, pushing Amazon Pay as a digital-based alternative to credit cards and Amazon Lending as a source of capital for its small business marketplace partners.

To quote Liberty Media chair John Malone, himself a billionaire titan of industry, Amazon is a “Death Star” moving its super-laser “into striking range of every industry on the planet.” If you are engaging in any economic activity, Amazon wants in, and its position in the market can distort and shape you in vital ways.

Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up Amazon and other tech giants has spurred a conversation on the Left about the overwhelming power of these companies. No entity has held the potential for this kind of dominance since the railroad tycoons of the first Gilded Age were brought to heel. Whether you share concerns about Amazon’s economic and political power or you just like getting free shipping on cheap toilet paper, you should at least know the implications of living in Amazon’s world—so you can assess whether it’s the world you want, and how it could be different.

Booksellers were the first to find themselves at the tip of Amazon’s spear, at the company’s founding in 1994. Years of Amazon peddling books below cost shuttered thousands of bookstores. Today, Amazon sells 42 percent of all books in America.

With such a large share of the market, Amazon determines what ideas reach readers. It ruthlessly squeezes publishers on wholesale costs; in 2014, it deliberately slowed down deliveries of books published by Hachette during a pricing dispute. By stocking best-sellers over independents and backlist copies, and giving publishers less money to work with, Amazon homogenizes the market. Publishers can’t afford to take a chance on a book that Amazon won’t keep in its inventory. “The core belief of bookselling is that we need to have the ideas out there so we can discuss them,” says Seattle independent bookseller Robert Sindelar. “You don’t want one company deciding, only based on profitability, what choice we have.”

These issues in just the book sector are a microcosm of Amazon’s effect on commerce.

The term “retail apocalypse” took hold in 2017 amid bankruptcies of established chains like The Limited, RadioShack, Payless ShoeSource and Toys “R” Us. According to frequent Amazon critic Stacy Mitchell, “more people lost jobs in general-merchandise stores than the total number of workers in the coal industry” in 2017.

Amazon isn’t the only cause; private equity looting must share much of the blame, and a shift to e-commerce was always going to hurt brick-and-mortar stores. But Amazon transformed a diverse collection of website sales into one mammoth business with the logistical power to perform rapid delivery of millions of products and a strategy to underprice everyone. That transformation accelerated a decline going back to the Great Recession (and much earlier for booksellers). Analysts at Swiss bank UBS estimate that every percentage point e-commerce takes from brick-and-mortar translates into 8,000 store closures, and right now e-commerce only has a 16% market share.

Take Harry Copeland (or, as he calls himself, “Crazy Harry”) of Harry’s Famous Flowers in Orlando, Fla., at one time a 40-employee retail/wholesale business. Revenue at his operation has shrunk by half since 2008, equal to millions of dollars in gross sales. “The internet … killed us,” Harry says. “I was in a Kroger, this guy walks up and says, ‘I want to apologize. It’s so easy to go on the internet.’ I said, ‘I did your wedding, I did flowers for your babies, and you’re buying [flowers] on the internet?’ ” Even Harry’s own employees receive Amazon packages at the shop every day. In January, tired of the fight, Harry sold his shop after 36 years in business.

Amazon was particularly deadly to the original “everything stores,” the department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney that anchor malls. When the anchor stores shut down, foot traffic slows and smaller shops struggle. Retailers are planning to close more than 4,000 stores in 2019; the 41,201 retail job losses in the first two months of this year were the highest since the Great Recession.

Dead malls trigger not only blight but also property tax losses. The broader shift to online shopping also transfers economic activity from local businesses to corporate coffers, like Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.

Some of these failed retail spaces have been scooped up, ironically, by Amazon’s suite of physical stores, such as Whole Foods. Amazon also skillfully pits cities against one another and wins tax breaks for its warehouse and data center facilities, starving local budgets even more.

Amazon, of course, argues it is the best friend small business ever had. Jeff Bezos’ 2019 annual letter indicated that 58% of all sales on the website are made by over 2 million independent third-party sellers, who are mostly small in size. In this rendering, Amazon is just a mall, opening its doors for the little guy to access billions of potential customers. “Third-party sellers are kicking our first-party butt,” Bezos exclaimed.

It was a line I repeated to several merchants, mostly to snickers. Take Crazy Harry. In late 2017, Amazon reached out with the opportunity for Harry’s Famous Flowers to sell through its website. Sales representatives promised instant success. “We went live in November,” he says. “I made three transactions, [including] one on Valentine’s Day and one on Christmas.” The closest delivery to his shop was 34 miles away. By the time Harry paid his $39.99 monthly subscription fee for selling on Amazon and a 15% cut of sales, his check came to $6.92. “The gas was $50,” he says.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the trouble: When Harry searched on Amazon under “flowers in Orlando,” his shop didn’t come up. Without including his name in the search, there was no way for customers to find him. Before long, Harry closed his Amazon account.

Crazy Harry’s troubles could be a function of Amazon running a platform that’s too big to manage. Two million Americans, close to 1% of the U.S. population, sell goods on Amazon. “There’s so much at stake for these sellers,” says Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee who now runs the consulting site eCommerceChris.com. “They’ve left jobs [to sell on Amazon]. They are supporting themselves and their families.”

Third-party sellers have been a great deal for Amazon—unsurprisingly, since Amazon sets the terms. Sellers pay a flat subscription fee and a percentage of sales, and an extra fee for “Fulfillment by Amazon,” for which Amazon handles customer service, storage and shipping through its vast logistics network. Fee revenue grew to nearly $43 billion in 2018, equal to more than one out of every four dollars that third-party sellers earned.

In other words, Amazon is collecting rent on every sale on its website. This strategy increases selection and convenience for customers, but the sellers, who have nowhere else to go, can get squeezed in the process. Once on the website, sellers are at the mercy of Amazon’s algorithmic placement in search results. They must also navigate rivals’ dirty tricks (like fake one-star reviews that sink sellers in search results) and counterfeit products. And if you get past all that, you must fight the boss level: Amazon, which has 138 house brands. Armed with all the data on sellers’ businesses, Amazon can easily figure out what’s hot and what can be cheaply produced, and then out-compete its own sellers with lower prices and prioritized search results.

Any failure to follow Amazon’s always-changing rules of the road can get a seller suspended, and in that case, Amazon not only stops all future sales, but refuses to release funds from prior sales. And all sellers must sign mandatory arbitration agreements that prevent them from suing Amazon. Several consultants I interviewed talked of sellers crying on the phone, finding themselves trapped after upending their lives to sell on Amazon.

While retail workers lose jobs, Amazon picks up some of the unemployment slack, hiring personnel to assemble its packages, make its electronics, and deliver its goods, with a U.S. workforce of more than 200,000, and another 100,000 seasonal workers—though 2018 research from the Conference Board confirmed the jobs created by e-commerce companies like Amazon do not make up for the loss of millions of retail jobs.

Plus, the experience of being a cog in Amazon’s great machine is, shall we say, unhealthy. We know much about the horrors of being an Amazon warehouse worker in the United States. These workplaces are aggressively anti-union. Amazon sets quotas for how many orders are fulfilled, monitoring a worker’s every move. Poor performers may be fired, typically over email. The daily monotony and pressure to perform has pushed workers to suicidal despair. A Daily Beast investigation found 189 instances between October 2013 and October 2018 of 911 calls summoning assistance to deal with suicide attempts or other mental-health emergencies at Amazon warehouses. And even these grunt jobs are insecure; Amazon had to reassure people this year that it wouldn’t turn over all warehouse jobs to robots, even as it rolled out machines that box orders.

Amazon’s other jobs, while less scrutinized than the warehouse workers, can be just as brutal. Thousands of delivery drivers wear Amazon uniforms, use Amazon equipment and work out of Amazon facilities. But they are not technically Amazon employees; they work for outside contractors called delivery service partners. These workers do not qualify for the guaranteed $15 minimum wage Bezos announced to much fanfare last year.

Contracting work out lets Amazon dodge liability for poor labor practices, a trick used by many corporations. At one such contractor in the mid-Atlantic, TL Transportation, one former employee (who requested anonymity) described the work as “running, running, running, rushing. There was no break time.” According to pay stubs, TL built two hours of overtime into its base rate, which is illegal under U.S. labor law. Other workers reported they always worked longer than the time on their pay stubs. Driver Tyhee Hickman of Pennsylvania testified to having to urinate into bottles to maintain the schedule.

Amazon runs plenty of air freight these days as well, through an “Amazon Air” fleet of planes branded with the Amazon logo—but these are also contracted out. At Atlas Air, one of three cargo carriers with Amazon business, pilots have been working without a new union contract since 2011. Atlas pays pilots 30% to 60% below the industry standard, according to Captain Daniel Wells, an Atlas Air pilot and president of the Airline Professionals Association Teamsters Local 1224. Planes are understaffed. “We’ve been critically short of crews,” Wells says. “Everyone is scrambling to keep operations going.”

The go-go-go schedule leaves little time for mechanics; planes go out with stickers indicating deferred maintenance. One Atlas Air flight carrying Amazon packages crashed in Texas in February, killing three workers.

Even while driving workers at a frenetic pace, Amazon doesn’t always deliver on its promise of convenience and efficiency. Many products no longer arrive in 48 hours under Prime’s guaranteed two-day shipping. It’s so challenging to reach customer service that Amazon sells a book on its website about how to do that. Whole Foods shoppers who have groceries delivered get bizarre food substitutions without warning.

Even as two-day shipping is creaking, Amazon has announced a move to one-day shipping, which will strain its systems even further while forcing competitors to adjust. Amazon’s one-day shipping announcement alone caused retail stocks to plummet on April 26, before any changes were implemented.

This feedback effect reveals how Amazon is not merely riding the wave of online retail’s convenience; only a company with ambitions as vast as Amazon’s could influence Fortune 500 business models across America.

Some retailers have given in. Walmart quickly announced its own next-day shipping. Kohl’s sells Amazon Echo devices. Target has bought up competitors to compete with Amazon on a larger scale. Call it concentration creep; one giant business triggers the need for others to get big, too. Corporate America is at once terrified of Amazon and reshaping itself to imitate it.

Take Amazon’s ever more sophisticated ploys to modify consumer behavior. With “personalized pricing,” Amazon uses the data of what someone has paid in the past to test what that person is willing to pay. The price of an item featured in the “buy” box on Amazon’s website may change multiple times per day, and can be tailored to individual shoppers. Amazon has charged more for Kindles based on a buyer’s location, and has steered people to higher-priced products where it makes a greater profit, rather than cheaper versions from outside sellers.

Now, even big-box stores have electronic price tags that retailers can “surge price” when demand increases. Amazon’s Whole Foods stores have become a testing ground for advancing this technique. Prices shown on electronic tags are tested, combined with discounts for Prime members, and relentlessly tweaked.

The potential damage to society from personalized pricing is significant, notes Maurice Stucke, a professor at the University of Tennessee. “It’s not just price discrimination, but also behavioral discrimination,” he says. “Getting people to buy things they might not have otherwise purchased, at the highest price they’re willing to pay.”

Amazon has plenty of options for this behavioral nudging, from listing a fake higher price and crossing it out to make it look like the customer is getting a deal, to its work on a facial recognition system using phone or computer cameras to authenticate purchases. With this tool, Amazon could theoretically read faces and increase prices when someone shows excitement about a product. Amazon has already licensed facial recognition software to local police units for criminal investigations, to outcry from privacy groups.

Then there’s Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, a powerful tool for manipulation. Alexa was designed to “be like the Star Trek computer,” said Paul Cutsinger, Amazon’s head of voice design education, at a developer conference earlier this year. Users can ask Alexa to play music and podcasts, answer questions, run health and wellness programs, set appointments, make purchases, even raise the temperature in the shower.

Psychologist Robert Epstein, who has pioneered research into search engine manipulation, has done preliminary studies on Alexa. “It looks like you can very easily impact the thinking and decision-making and purchases of people who are undecided,” Epstein says. “That unfortunately gives a small number of companies tremendous power to influence people without them being aware.” For example, Alexa can suggest a wine to go with the pizza you just ordered. It can also encourage you to set up a recurring purchase, the price of which may then go up based on Amazon’s list price.

The influence only increases as Alexa takes in more data. We know that Alexa is constantly watching and listening to users, transcribing what it hears and even transmitting some of that data back to a team of human listeners at Amazon, who “refine” the machine’s comprehension. The surveillance doesn’t only happen on Alexa, but in the smart home devices it integrates with, and on the website where Amazon tracks search and purchase activity. Amazon even has a Ring doorbell and in-home monitor, which sends information back to Amazon. There is no escape. “Devices all around us are watching everything we do, talking to each other, sharing data,” Epstein says. “We’re embedded in a surveillance network.”

Even as it's influencing our behavior, Amazon is transforming our physical world. José Holguín-Veras, a logistics and urban freight expert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, estimates that in 2009, there was one daily internet-derived delivery for every 25 people. By 2017, he calculates, this had tripled. “The number of deliveries to households is now larger than the number of deliveries to commercial establishments,” Holguín-Veras says. “In skyscrapers in New York City where 5,000 people live, it’s 750 deliveries a day.”

Think of the difference between one trip to the grocery store for the week, and five or ten trips from the warehouse to your house. Our streets are too narrow and our traffic too plentiful to handle that additional traffic without crippling congestion. Plus, every idling car, and every extra delivery truck on the road, spews more carbon into the atmosphere. Our cities are not designed for the level of freight that instant delivery demands.

More deliveries also means more people staying indoors. “One thing I think about is how much we overlook the community and democracy value of running errands,” says Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “These exchanges—chatting with someone in line, bumping into a neighbor on the street, talking with the store owner—may not be all that significant personally. But this kind of interaction pays off for us collectively in ways we don’t think about or measure or account for in policy-making.”

In These Times asked Frank McAndrew of Knox College, who has researched social isolation, whether Amazon’s perfect efficiency could be alienating. He wasn’t ready to make a definitive statement but did see some red flags. “I do think we’re sort of wired to interact with real people in face-to-face situations,” McAndrew says. “When most of our interactions take place virtually, or with Alexa, it’s not going to be satisfying.”

For most of our history, Americans didn’t require a personal digital assistant to answer our every whim. Why are we now reordering our social and economic lives, so one man can accumulate more money than anyone in the history of the planet?

One answer is that Amazon has paid as much attention to capturing government as it has to captivating customers. Amazon’s lobbying spending is among the highest of any company in America. After winning a nationwide procurement contract, over 1,500 cities and states can buy office items through the Amazon Business portal; a federal procurement platform is on the way. Amazon Web Services has the inside track on a $10 billion cloud contract to manage sensitive data for the Pentagon, something it already does for the CIA. That’s part of the reason why Amazon moved its second headquarters (after an absurd, game show-style bidding war that gave the company access to valuable data on hundreds of cities’ planning decisions) to a suburb of Washington, D.C., the seat of national power.

Making the directors of the regulatory state dependent on your services is a genius move. What political figure would dare crack down on the behavior of a trusted partner like Amazon?

In fact, Amazon has relied on government largesse since day one. No sales taxes for online purchases gave it a pricing advantage over other sellers (while a 2018 Supreme Court ruling changed that, the damage had been done). No carbon taxes helped Amazon build energy-intensive businesses dependent on fossil fuels for transportation and server farms. A lack of antitrust enforcement created a path for Amazon to super-size into an e-commerce monopoly. Weak federal labor rules let Amazon stamp out collective bargaining and rely on independent contractors. Mandatory arbitration locked third-party sellers inside Amazon’s private appeals process. Favorable tax law allowed Amazon to apply annual losses in previous years to its past two tax returns, paying no federal taxes on billions in income.

Of course, these rules helped all corporate giants and made executives filthy rich, often at the expense of workers. But Amazon tests the laissez-faire system in unique ways. In a future where Amazon broadens its control over our lives such that citizens have nowhere else to shop, businesses have nowhere else to sell, workers have nowhere else to toil, and governments have no other way to function, then who actually holds the power in our society? Avoiding that dark future requires leaders with the political will to stop it.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Amazon would rein in what she sees as unfair competition by preventing Amazon from selling products while hosting a website platform for other sellers. Warren also suggests splitting off Whole Foods and the online retailer Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2017 and 2009, respectively.

Fostering competition is a good start, but regulation must also prevent Amazon from bullying suppliers and partners. Lawmakers must force Amazon to pay for the externalities associated with its carbon-intensive delivery network. The company must pay a living wage to its workers, including its so-called independent contractors. It must be accountable to the legal system rather than a corporate-friendly arbitration process. It must not profit from spying on its customers.

If Amazon has caused this much upheaval today, when online shopping is still only 16% of retail sales, the future is limitless and grim. We have time to reverse this transfer of power and make it our world instead of Amazon’s. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to squander.